A customer called me from outside Noema at nine twenty on a Tuesday evening in August. He had a reservation for nine o’clock. He was at the villa when he should have been in the car, and he had spent the remaining twenty minutes standing on a road with no reliable sidewalk trying to locate a taxi on an island where, in August, finding a taxi when you need one is about as reliable as finding a parking space in the same place you’re trying to reach.
The table was gone by the time he arrived.
That evening was not saved. These things sometimes can’t be saved. What I could do, and what I did the next morning, was make sure the rest of the week wouldn’t have the same problem. From there, there was a driver and a car. Everything related to transportation for the remaining five days was invisible, which is the correct state for transportation. He didn’t think about it anymore.
I tell this story because it is representative rather than exceptional. In twenty-five years of managing stays in Mykonos through Unique Conciergetransportation is the element that customers have not thought about most often, and the element that, when it goes wrong, has a particular capacity to damage everything that has been well organized. A good dinner is not a great dinner if you arrive there agitated and twenty minutes late. The island offers extraordinary things. Getting between them requires a plan.
Why Mykonos is different The island is small. On a map, this looks like a place where transportation shouldn’t present much difficulty. What the map doesn’t reflect is the reality of these roads during the second week of July, when the number of people trying to use them has no relation to the reason they were built. Mykonos has the road network of a Cycladic fishing community and the traffic requirements of one of Europe’s most visited destinations. The two do not get along easily together.
Scorpios, Nammos, the beach clubs of the south coast, the port, the old town are not far from each other in kilometers. In time, in high season, at the wrong time, they can indeed be very far from each other. A driver who knows the island knows which route operates at noon and which operates at midnight, knows that the road past the airport is not the answer to most problems and is sometimes the answer at all, knows where to wait outside a location without creating an obstacle and without having to call for directions.
None of this knowledge is complicated. It is specific to this island and it is acquired over time spent on it. I was sending clients around Mykonos long before Scorpios existed in its current form, before the beach club industry transformed the south coast and the transportation problem had not become easier with the development of the island. It became more acute.
The airport Arrivals and departures set the tone for or close out everything that happens in between, and both deserve more attention than they typically receive from people planning a stay here.
A good arrival in Mykonos means that when the customer leaves the terminal, someone knows where the luggage is and the car is forty meters away. This means that the journey to the villa is the start of the holiday rather than an extension of the journey. This means that the first impression of the island is a good one, which matters more than it seems, because first impressions tend to stick.
A good start means leaving the villa without doing mental arithmetic about whether there is enough time, without the slight anxiety of a guest who isn’t entirely sure the car is coming. Flight times at Mykonos Airport in August are the kind of thing best left untested. Arriving at the airport with time to spare is not a complicated task. This requires a driver who knows what time to arrive, which is due to having planned it rather than guessing.
Excursions and what connects them Mykonos is a useful base for the surrounding islands. Delos in the morning is an experience that pays off for getting there: the archaeological site is truly one of the extraordinary places of the ancient world, and Rhenia, the uninhabited island just beyond, has the kind of beaches that most visitors to Mykonos spend their entire stay without knowing exist.
These excursions involve a boat and a port at both ends. The boat has a departure time and a return time, and these times connect to the car on the island. A customer who returns to the port at four in the afternoon should find the car there, not discover that the car was booked for three and a half hours and left.
Coordinating transportation throughout a stay in Mykonos – the airport, daily movements, excursions, late evenings and early mornings – is something that Concierge Unique handles naturally, because after twenty-five years of doing this, we know that these are the details that guests underestimate the most and that shape the feel of everything else.
If you are planning time in Mykonos and would like transportation to be invisible, contact Concierge Unique directly.
Tolis Voutsás Tolis Voutsas is founder and CEO of Unique Concierge. Concierge Unique is a luxury private concierge company established in Mykonos in 1999, arranging villa rentals, yacht charters, private jet transfers, destination weddings and tailor-made experiences for ultra-high net worth clients across Greece and abroad. If you would like to become a guest blogger on A Luxury Travel Blog to raise your profile, please Contact us.
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